THEATER

THEATER; Theater's Godfather Reaches Entr'acte

By HILARY DE VRIES;

Published: June 30, 1991

It tells you something about Lloyd Richards that when asked to assess his career in the American theater, one that spans nearly half a century, he tells a story about other people.

"John Guare once said to me, 'I have needs as a playwright,' " says Mr. Richards. " 'I need a place where I can work, but I also need to have my picture in the newspapers.' What he was saying was that he wanted to be a playwright and to be acknowledged as a playwright. He wanted a life in the theater."

If any individual has been pivotal in helping playwrights and other artists find homes in the American theater, it has been Lloyd Richards. From his first public success -- directing Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking drama "A Raisin in the Sun" on Broadway in 1959 -- to his continuing collaboration with the playwright August Wilson, Mr. Richards has served as adviser and enabler to some of the country's finest theatrical talent.

In the five decades that he has been working -- as a radio announcer in Detroit before World War II, as an unknown Off Broadway actor during the 50's and now as a Tony Award-winning director and leader in the nation's regional theater movement -- Mr. Richards has commanded as much influence in the country as any theater figure working outside Broadway.

In the last 12 years he has held four major positions -- artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, dean of the Yale School of Drama, director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's annual playwright's conference, and member of the national council, the advisory body for the National Endowment for the Arts. In those posts he has influenced the careers of such actors as Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones and Charles Dutton and such playwrights, in addition to Mr. Wilson, as Lee Blessing, Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Noble Prize winner.

"You see Lloyd's influence everywhere," says Zelda Fichandler, former artistic director of the Arena Stage in Washington and artistic director of the Acting Company in New York. "You see it in playwriting, the notion of developing a play, in the numbers of African-American actors working, in casting classical works with people of color, and in his merging a school with a functioning theater."

Indeed, in the American regional theater movement Mr. Richards's preferred role has been that of teacher, mentor, nurturer. Even on the eve of his retirement from Yale (he will be officially replaced next month by Stan Wojewodski Jr., the former artistic director of Center Stage in Baltimore), Mr. Richards's influence persists.

He describes his aims simply: "There is a social and political conscience to everything I do." This personal agenda has helped broaden the nation's cultural parameters, especially through increased ethnic diversity in the American theater and play development.

As director of that original production of "Raisin," Mr. Richards is regarded as among the first artists to unveil middle-class black family life to white audiences that had not yet encountered the civil rights struggles of the 60's. Edith Oliver of The New Yorker has said of that seminal production, "It opened up a whole way of life to all of us."

Twenty years later, Mr. Richards was using his positions at Yale to create an artistic home for Mr. Fugard's excoriating South African dramas and Mr. Wilson's searing black history plays. Mr. Fugard's " 'Master Harold' . . . and the Boys" and "The Road to Mecca" had their world premieres at Yale, as have all of Mr. Wilson's works (under Mr. Richards's direction), from "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences" and "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" to last year's "Two Trains Running." Mr. Wilson has said of his director, mentor and colleague, "because of Lloyd, I found a home in the theater. I will follow him wherever he goes."

To talk with the soft-spoken director about his accomplishments is to encounter a study in self-effacement. Short, compact and bespectacled -- the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, a former student, once called him "the black Santa Claus" -- Mr. Richards looks every inch the paterfamilias. He is also something of an enigma, an intensely private man even to those who know him well.

And on a recent early morning, in the living room of his town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Richards is a study in watchful affability. Although he has spent much of his time in university housing during his Yale tenure, for the last 20 years this has been his home -- a serene, loftlike space of exposed brick walls and hardwood floors that is furnished in antiques, African art, musical instruments and family photographs. But even now, even here, he dismisses attempts to sum up his career -- "That's a look back, and I'm not ready to do that." Rather, he discusses his accomplishments in terms of other artists (he refers to his relationship with Mr. Wilson as the "culmination" of his career) and institutions, be it the National Endowment, the O'Neill or Yale.

"My commitment to theater has had a great deal to do with the drama school," he says in his slow, narrative style. "I started out to make the kind of school that I would have liked to have gone to. Training people -- creating a bridge into the profession -- that's what I consider valuable."